Drought and Rain: re-creations in Vietnamese, cross-border heritage

Abstract

The Drought and Rain dance trilogy, by Vietnamese–French choreographer Ea Sola, evokes memory, history and everyday practices through song, stylised gesture and stark, graceful images. The performances aim not to represent ancient and wartime Vietnamese pasts as much as call attention to the ways in which the present and past invigorate and co-create each other. The unsettled, recursive and processual nature of Ea Sola’s performances suggest it is necessary to periodically re-encounter the continuing legacies of violence. The performances enact a different form of historical (re)productivity, not predicated on a linear materialism, but based on processes of temporal turn and re-turn. I employ the most recent performance in the series, Drought and Rain 2011, as both subject and lens for exploring the unfinished dynamics of memory–history, and as a site and practice of cultural heritage. Embodying a hybrid mix of multiple re-performance categories, the Drought and Rain performances stretch current notions of heritage and are cross-border in terms of culture, nationality, arts genre and aesthetics and political implication. Primary points of focus include: the non-originality of performance, the unfinished nature of the past, and the way in which the Drought and Rain performances propose a counter-memory of the future.